​Choosing a future: What the Kurdish minority’s parliamentary triumph means for Turkey

Nadezhda Kevorkova has worked at RT since 2010, before which she was a special correspondent for ‘Novaya gazeta,’ ‘Nezavisimaya gazeta,’ and ‘Gazeta.’ Kevorkova has also worked extensively in Russian mass-media. As a war correspondent, she covered the Arab Spring, military and religious conflicts, and the anti-globalization movement. She has worked as a reporter in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Cuba, and in the republics of the North Caucasus, Tatarstan, and in the Far East. In 2001, after an invitation from US State Department, Kevorkova visited a number of states, including Alaska. As a correspondent of 'Gazeta' she reported from Indian settlements in the US. She covered the ‘Gaza Freedom Flotilla’ in 2008, 2010 and 2011; she also visited Gaza several times during the blockade. In 2010, Kevorkova was nominated for the ‘International Women of Courage’ award.

It has managed to rack
up some 13 percent of the vote and thereby taking 80 out of the
550 seats in parliament.

This has effectively
stripped President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP of its
parliamentary majority and undermined the political prospects of
the Middle East’s once most successful partisan president.

It’s too early to predict the outcome of this victory, now that a
very large mechanism, the so-called Kurdish factor, has been
activated in the region.

“We are HDP, we are in the parliament,” people were
chanting walking through the streets of Istanbul. On Sunday
night, it was very easy to tell a Turk from a Kurd, as the latter
were celebrating the victory.

Essentially, they were celebrating their victory over the one who
had helped them overcome the long-term notion of being
terrorists, and gave them equal rights.

By 10 pm, Istanbul was filled with sporadic exultations of the
minority, while the majority was now contemplating the minority
from a new perspective.

The Kurdish party virtually became the favorite of this election,
despite finishing in a modest fourth place. Kurds were dancing,
clapping their hands, chanting and cheering. Glowing with
happiness, they invited everyone to share their victory.

The police was about to put up their shields against a
spontaneous celebration in downtown Istanbul. However, they
suddenly decided to pack up and leave the vociferous, but
peaceful crowd to carry on their festivities.

Next Monday has been announced as a public day off, so the
celebrations are bound to continue.

It is the first time a pro-Kurdish party has won seats in
parliament. Kurds make up one-fifth of Turkey’s population, but
on Sunday night, they seemed to be everywhere. Even inside the
election press center, you could instantly tell members of the
two communities apart. If someone was gleaming with joy, you
could safely bet they were Kurdish.

The society was transforming literally before our very own eyes.

The rejoicing Kurds look as if they became the parliamentary
majority.

Literally all of them - women with head scarves, and those
without any head cover; posh young people driving their
convertibles, and workers pushing their trolleys, the poor and
successful middle class alike - demonstrated a kind of joy that
wasn’t yet fully understood. They were all rejoicing but not
quite realizing yet what this victory meant for them.

Police pushing demonstrators back looks like some HDP folks
trying to calm demonstrators in their ranks pic.twitter.com/eSmnw3IzRT

A week before the election many had doubts that the HDP would
even cross the 10 percent threshold. Moreover, the first data
from the polling stations wasn’t very promising either. The
pro-government agency informed that President Erdogan’s party had
received 56 percent of the vote. Between 8 pm and midnight, this
number dropped to 40 percent.

At the end of the day, the AKP has taken 258 seats, losing its
parliamentary majority – and the right to form a government.
Meanwhile, opposition leaders have already announced their
parties would not enter into a coalition with the AKP. This
effectively renders Erdogan’s ambitious plans for rewriting the
Constitution and transforming Turkey into a presidential republic
unattainable.

Ironically, such an outcome of the election had been largely
predicted by opinion polls and expert assessments by public
officials. And yet it has taken everyone by surprise.

Erdogan did not show up at the AKP rally following the vote. That
was understandable: for the first time in thirteen years of
constant victories, the Turkish president has nothing to
celebrate.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the formal leader of AKP, did
deliver a speech, urging the Turks to reform the Constitution and
bring about a presidential republic. But his calls didn’t sound
very appealing this time, and news broadcasters covering the AKP
rally quickly switched to covering street celebrations by the
jubilant Kurds.

One in five voters in Turkey is Kurdish. The Kurds are the most
religious community in the country, and yet they have not
supported Erdogan’s Islamist party. This was despite the fact it
was Erdogan who brought about a dramatic change of status for
Turkey’s Kurdish minority, something even his political opponents
tend to acknowledge.

Some twenty years ago, as much as openly identifying oneself as a
Kurd, constituted an act of rebellion in Turkey. For about five
decades, it was considered synonymous to being a radical leftist,
waging an incessant guerilla war and plotting numerous terrorist
attacks all over the country.

The Soviet Union supported the Kurds in their insurgency by
providing weapons. Following its collapse, Israel gradually
developed relationships with Kurdish minorities across the Middle
East, establishing itself as the Kurds’ new patron and using the
Kurdish state trump card against its opponents in the region. The
Israelis apparently saw Kurdish Nationalism as a useful tool for
keeping Turkey and its ambitious leader at bay.

The Erdogan government managed to upset that strategy by courting
the conservative, religious part of the Kurdish community and
effectively marginalizing the leftist, Marxist and Anarchist
Kurdish groups. Erdogan and the AKP have reconciled the Turks and
the Kurds by promoting Islamic unity while stating their
commitment to ethnic diversity. The Kurds were granted the right
to study in their own language, have their own mosques and media
outlets, and receive support and certain privileges from the
government.

The June 7 election has undermined all these years of hard work
for Erdogan.

Shortly before the vote, Erdogan made the mistake of publicly arguing that Turkey
doesn’t have a Kurdish issue. Despite Erdogan’s personal
contribution to actually resolving that issue, his opponents
exploited the blunder to the full, and the religious majority of
Kurds, who used to vote for Erdogan, denied him their support and
voted for Kurdish candidates instead.

Two days ahead of the
election, two bombs went off at a pro-HDP rally in Diyarbakir,
the largest city in the predominantly Kurdish Southeast Turkey.
Two people werekilled. President Erdogan denounced the
terrorist attack as a provocation and, rather belatedly, offered
his condolences to the victims’ families.

And it does not matter whether this or something else has
affected the public preferences.

The collapse of the lira after the election results were
announced, was the first precursor of the looming instability.

The outcome of an election in Turkey is not limited to
percentages and seats in parliament. Perhaps, no one in Turkey
will dare to forecast what will be the ultimate ramifications of
this new political setup. The final results are to be released by
the Election Commission in 10-12 days.

Turkish society is so polarized that even the front runners among
independent candidates, who had been expected to make it into the
parliament, failed. The well-known Turkish footballer Hakan Sukur
did not get enough votes. You need to realize that football is an
extremely popular sport in Turkey.Sukur could have got the votes
of protest voters – back in 2013 he left Erdogan’s party.

Judging by the preliminary election results available today, no
independent candidate has won a seat in the parliament.

Many media outlets have made premature attempts to give up on
Turkey’s Islamists. However, there is no clarity on this point.

What happened in reality is that the pro-Kurdish party managed to
accumulate the protest vote. Founded in 2012, it first proclaimed
itself to be the party of all minorities, not just ethnic ones.
There is even an LGBT faction at the HDP, though they were not
making a show of themselves at the festive demonstrations.

Some people now start to remember that the Kurdish party leader
Selahattin Demirtas used to criticize the work of the Religious
Affairs Directorate, the tool that technically helped establish a
truce between the Kurds and the Turks.
Othersrecall what he said last year at a meeting in support of
the Palestinians, amid Israel’s bombing campaign of Gaza, that
Erdogan had better sever all economic and military relations with
Israel, instead of shouting slogans.

Thepublic election-caused elationwill soon subside. Turkey is
facing a number of pressing issues such as the economic downturn,
unemployment and now a parliamentary crisis and difficulties of
forming a government, which could lead to another early election
being called.

What will Erdogan and the opposition choose to do? Will they
deliver a solution to the crisis? What part will the two million
Syrian refugees in Turkey, who got a warm-hearted brotherly
reception there, play? How will the war raging in Syria affect
the situation? There is no immediate response to any of these
questions.

Turkey, once the most confident and powerful state in the region,
has suddenly found it self on the brink of plunging into
political and economic instability with no clear solutions to the
problem.

Experts on Middle East have become used to the state boundaries
being redrawn in bold virtual strokes from time to time. Many of
them still remember the map showing a Kurdish state placed by the
generous hand of political schemers where the present-day Turkey,
Syria, Iraq and Iran are located.

Will another scheduled election be a step in this direction, or
will the Middle Easts spiral into another whirl of sprawling
war,or will Turkey stand firm? – All these global questions have
been brought in to light by the moderate success of the
pro-Kurdish party.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.